The toddler and the pigeon

Watching a very small boy trying to catch a pigeon that was pecking the ground around the cafe tables, I wondered why the bird kept running away rather than taking off to land out of reach. Had it learned that miniature human beings who try to chase you normally fall over? Were the breadcrumbs worth the risk? Was it enjoying the game, or was it just a very stupid pigeon?

It looked a bit stupid as it scuttled in front of the toddler with its head comically bobbing backwards and forwards, but of course they all do that. Scientists claim the pigeon is not bobbing its head at all, it's thrusting it forward then holding it fixed in space while the rest of the body catches up. Stabilising its vision to ensure maximum awareness of its surroundings. Clever. Chickens do it too, and various other birds. I've never managed to see it as anything but bobbing.

'Well?'

'What? Oh, right. Say it again, I got distracted.'

A favourite activity when otherwise doing nothing but sitting around in cafes (as already mentioned in Four bitches, 30 July 2016) is to improve our grasp of the Spanish language by reading aloud from a novel. Person A interprets the Spanish text into English, person B has to translate it back into Spanish, swapping roles every few minutes. But it's so easy to get distracted when you're sitting in the open air outside a cafe.

During a coffee break the other day on a windy morning, I got distracted by a supermarket carrier bag flying past my legs. Snatching at it far too late, I watched it settle briefly on a flower bed then lift into the air again to swoop behind some palm trees and out across the plaza, heading towards the beach and the sea.

A minute or two later it came flying past our table again. This is a known and fascinating feature of this particular cafe. The prevailing northerly winds interact with the surrounding buildings to form large eddy currents like whirlpools in a lake, reliably carrying paper serviettes and plastic bags in endless cycles past the tables.

'I'm not going to chase after it,' I assured Janine. That way madness lies. Every minute of the day in thousands of towns around the world there are carrier bags, chip packets and sweet wrappers escaping into freedom and many of them end up flying out to sea. Catching one of them isn't going to save the planet.

After about half a dozen circuits the carrier bag whizzed past at low level and wrapped itself around a chair leg. I lunged, grabbed it and banged my head on the edge of the table.

'You said you weren't going to…'

'I know, I know.' But what can you do against such deliberate taunting?

You could view (and I do) a susceptibility to distraction as a necessary element of the human survival kit. It's not useful to be immovably focused on a Spanish novel if there's a sociopath with an axe creeping around the place. In more relaxed situations, however, this instinct can be a social liability. We once had a friend who would so frequently stop listening because there was something more interesting going on behind you that we immortalised their name as a technical term. 'I've just been Xxxxed!'

The fact is, though, everyone does it occasionally. Janine will sometimes - very, very rarely - lose contact if I'm rambling on while a dog is playing games nearby. Me, I tend to be lured away by toddlers chasing pigeons. Pigeons chasing other pigeons are quite hard to ignore as well.

The most impressive resistance to distraction I've ever witnessed was when a young man, a complete stranger, engaged me in a one-sided conversation about how he'd come to Gomera in order to find himself. He was still rummaging deeply among his psychological intricacies as I politely left him in order to watch a helicopter performing acrobatics above the bay. I decided that a large part of this guy's problem was an ability to remain resolutely focused on himself while a simulated air-sea rescue was going on behind him.

And since you ask: no, the toddler never did manage to catch the pigeon and yes, he did fall over.